The Pouakai Read online

  David Sperry is a pilot and instructor for a major airline, based in Honolulu. He and his family live near Seattle. In addition to this book, David has written several articles for aviation magazines and newspapers. He spends his scant free time enjoying life with his family, bicycling, and hiking the great outdoors.

  The Pouakai

  by

  David Sperry

  This is a work of fiction. The events and characters portrayed herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places, events or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author do not necessarily represent the opinions of the publisher.

  The Pouakai

  David Sperry

  ISBN-13: 978-1-925148-39-8

  Copyright David Sperry 2014

  Published by IFWG Publishing International

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  IFWG Publishing International

  www.ifwgpublishing.com

  To Lana, for her infinite patience and love, and to Suzanne, for teaching me the joy of words.

  Part 1

  Nanumea

  2.30pm

  Outside the cockpit window, the cobalt blue Pacific Ocean sparkled, a mere seven miles below me. An endless series of swells pushed up by storms over the deserted islands of Kiribati, a hundred miles to our west, were etched with whitecaps like ribbons of fine lace. It gave the impression that the world was still normal.

  I scanned the instrument panel of the worn Boeing 767 I was shepherding through the sky. So far, everything had held together. Our escorts, a pair of F-22 fighter jets and their KC-10 tanker, flew in formation a few miles on either side of us.

  Brett Haldeman snored quietly in the co-pilot seat. His newborn baby girl had kept him up late last night, and the gentle rush of air around the cockpit lulled him to sleep shortly after takeoff. Relief pilot Jeff Lee sat on the jumpseat behind me, deep into a book of crosswords. He’d shown up for the flight bright-eyed and ready to go, even after being out clubbing until late last night. He’d been relaxed and dependable on my flights, so I didn’t worry about him. Neither of them appeared bothered by the risks of this trip, but I was. I guess worry is the domain of the Captain, but I couldn’t relax until we’d landed in Sydney. That would just be a temporary pause in the risk. We would fly home to Honolulu after a two-day layover.

  I should have felt lucky. Most of my co-workers at the airline had been laid off when the tattered remains of the industry were nationalized. I should have been appreciative that my seniority and military background allowed me to keep this job, that I could still make a living as a pilot. The horrors of the past three years prevented me from feeling any gratitude, however. I was glad I could still fly for a living, yet I felt guilty that I was here, while so many friends were barely scraping by on government handouts. I couldn’t find a way to enjoy the job.

  6.45pm

  The island’s Chief picked his way across the sandy floor toward me, through the mass of people crammed into the shelter. An old pair of shorts and a deeply stained T-shirt were all he wore. He stopped in front of me, wiping a few beads of sweat from the dark brown skin of his forehead.

  “Your friend is gone,” he said quietly.

  I nodded.

  “You want this?” He handed me a dark rectangle; Brett’s wallet. I stared at it for a moment, and then took it.

  “Thanks.”

  “Your arm, better?”

  It hurt, but the worst of the immediate post-crash pain was gone. “Yeah, I think so. Thanks.”

  The Chief nodded. “It was dislocated, but will heal.”

  “You’ve had medical training?”

  He swept an arm toward the crowd around us in the decrepit Quonset hut. “No more than any of us. You learn survival skills when you live in place like this.”

  The shelter overflowed with several times the number of people it was designed to hold. Many of my crew and passengers had some sort of injury, major or minor. The salty, earthy smell of the shelter competed with the odor of broken and battered bodies packed inside. Lit with a few dim coconut-oil lamps, it gave me a twinge of claustrophobia. A handful of locals scurried about, tending to the most seriously wounded.

  “We were really surprised to find you here,” I said, “but we’re grateful.”

  A smile crossed his weather-worn face.

  “No more surprised than we were to have you drop in on us, Captain.”

  His smile faded, and he settled on the ground next to me, cross-legged. He extended a hand. “I am Chief Kalahamotu.”

  “Mark Boone.” I returned the handshake. “Everyone calls me Boonie.” I coughed. Pain shot down my ribs.

  The chief waited for my coughing to subside. Then he asked quietly, “What is happening in the world, Captain Boonie?”

  “How much do you know?”

  “Our radio failed two and a half years ago. We have heard nothing since.”

  I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. Two and a half years. How would I tell him what had happened during that time? How would I describe the violence, death, and despair? And how would I explain that the entire world thought the Chief, and everyone like him, was dead?

  2.35pm

  Palm Tree fifty-five, Hoku one,” came the voice over the speaker from the lead escort fighter.

  “This is Palm Tree fifty-five, go ahead,” I said.

  “We are moving to the tanker for refueling.”

  “Roger, we’ll be watching.”

  I didn’t envy those pilots, strapped into their fighters, with no room to stretch or stand up, for the ten-plus hours to Sydney.

  The timing of this refueling sucked too. The weapons control radar on the number two fighter had died a couple of hours out of Honolulu, leaving just the lead ship with an operating unit. Radar was ineffective when they were hooked up to the tanker, leaving us blind. We had just crossed the equator, putting us right into the heart of the Roc’s territory. It wouldn’t take long to top off the fighters, but I’d feel better once they were full of fuel and back on station, sweeping the sky ahead of us for danger.

  6.50pm

  “We still don’t know where the Rocs came from,” I told the Chief. “The first reports came from Vanuatu, three years ago.”

  He nodded. “I heard from my cousin in Port Vila after they arrived that those things were dangerous but not deadly.”

  “That’s true, until the Rocs started multiplying, and attacking in swarms.”

  “They came here later that year,” His voice was barely above a whisper. “We did not know what to expect, but they came. Our cargo ship was sunk leaving Funafuti. After that, no more ships. A month later our generator ran out of fuel, and then the batteries died. We had no radio, no contact. We have not heard anything since.”

  I shook my head and took a deep breath. “They spread along the equator. From the central Pacific they moved east until they hit South America. They migrated westward too, around Indonesia, into the Indian Ocean and up against Africa. Experts thought that the Atlantic would remain clear, but they slowly worked northward until they got to the Red Sea. The UN, NATO, the US and Russia, China; we tried everything imaginable to stop them. The Sinai is a radioactive wasteland now, but it didn’t help. They still kept coming. A year ago they made it into the Mediterranean, and from there they spread into the Atlantic. They hit the Caribbean and the Panama Canal six months ago, and joined up with the ones on the Pacific side. They’re all the way around the world now.”

  “They’re everywhere?” the Chief
asked.

  “In the equatorial oceans, yes. When they fly, they don’t go more than ten miles inland, and the latest reports suggest that their range is increasing into cooler waters.”

  “When will they stop?”

  “We don’t know. They’ve encircled the Earth, and it’s like a noose tightening to the point of strangling.”

  2.40pm

  Jennifer had begged me not to do these trips, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop. Fly north, she’d sobbed, fly to the mainland. Anywhere but across the equator. The money was too good though, and flying was the only thing I’d wanted to do as long as I could remember. I couldn’t let those damn things stop me. For all the efforts of scientists and the military however, there didn’t seem to be any way to stop the Rocs’ spread.

  I watched the tanker and fighters flying in formation, two miles to our left. The lead fighter was hooked up to the tanker, drinking in the precious fuel. I’d done that too, in the Air National Guard, before moving to the airlines. It’s impossible to describe the joy of flying a machine like that, or even this worn-out airliner, to someone who didn’t have a passion for flying. To be able to move so effortlessly through three dimensions, or to soar across oceans and time zones with ease and security; that was what I loved. Flying’s ease and security had vanished when the Rocs showed up.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, and glanced at the reflection in the sun visor. Too damn much gray up there, and just in the last few years too. I’d gone from a few strands to salt and pepper seemingly overnight. More salt than pepper now, really.

  Maybe Jennifer was right. Maybe I should be thinking about moving on. I’d just turned fifty, but I’d been feeling a lot older lately. Josh and Kelly were both in college on the mainland. Even though the Rocs hadn’t made it that far north yet, the economy of Hawaii had tanked because everyone was leaving. Nobody talked about them much in public, but it was assumed the Rocs would make it there eventually.

  We could move far away from the ocean, Jen had suggested again last week, perhaps Colorado. They wouldn’t get us there, she’d said, tears streaming down her face. If we did move, I would have to quit my job. With record unemployment, I probably wouldn’t be working again. Especially not as a pilot. In a few years though, it really wouldn’t matter where we were living. The world economy was listing like the Titanic, and it seemed that nothing could stop it from sinking. What lay beyond that was too scary to think about.

  I glanced down at the nav screen. We were crossing five degrees south latitude. Another waypoint was coming up, and I had to make a position report. I brought up the data from the flight management computer, wrote it on the worksheet, and put on the headset to make the call. Just before I keyed the mike, I noticed a smudge above the horizon in front of us; a thin, grayish cloud that didn’t match the sprinkling of cumulus buildups in the area. There were more of the same gray blobs below it, and off to our right too. Then the cloud moved slowly, shifting shape, and a knot tightened in my stomach. I couldn’t see the individual dots in the cloud yet, but I knew what it was.

  “Oh shit,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Here we go.”

  6.55pm

  “What else do you know about them?” the Chief asked. “What are they?”

  “The latest guess is that the Rocs may be extraterrestrial,” I replied.

  The Chief frowned and shook his head. “Sorry, my English is not good. Extra, what?”

  “It means they came from someplace other than Earth. From space.”

  The Chief looked at me, his expression unchanged. After several seconds, I added, “From the stars.”

  Both of the Chief’s eyebrows rose slowly. He stood up and left without saying a word. I watched him go, and then shifted in my improvised seat to keep an eye on the survivors being tended to across the shelter. It seemed we’d been lucky, losing only five, but one of those had been Brett. I thumbed through his wallet and stopped when I came to a picture of his family. The snapshot had him holding his baby girl, with a big silly grin on his face. Looking at the photo, the brutal truth of his death hit hard. Pain welled up inside of me, and before I knew it, tears rolled down my cheeks.

  2.45pm

  “Hoku one, we’ve got trouble!” I said over the radio.

  The fighter detached from the tanker and rolled left.

  “Got ’em on the screen,” he replied. The second fighter followed, and the tanker made a hard turn away from us, to separate the targets for the Rocs.

  “Hoku, this is Reach,” the tanker pilot said. “We’ve got trouble behind us too.”

  Dammit. There were Rocs behind us as well. Were they that intelligent, and able to plan a coordinated attack? It hadn’t happened before, but maybe they were learning. Either that, or we’d just flown into the biggest flock of them ever seen.

  “Jesus, that’s a lot of them,” said the second fighter pilot.

  “Keep going forward,” said the lead fighter pilot. “The ones behind us won’t catch us unless we turn around. Reach, Palm Tree, stay close behind. We’ll cut a trail for you.”

  The tanker rolled toward us, and pulled up in close formation alongside my plane. The fighters moved directly in front of us, ready to shoot their way through the gathering cloud. I still couldn’t see the individual Rocs, but the cloud seemed to coalesce and darken ahead as the things moved into our path.

  “How far?” I asked over the radio.

  “Twenty two miles. Contact in just over three minutes. We’ll wait until we’re almost on them before we launch the missiles. Both of you guys stay close behind us.”

  “Roger,” the tanker pilot replied.

  “Roger,” I echoed.

  Brett and Jeff cleaned up around their seats, and strapped in. I made a short PA to the sixty passengers on the other side of the cockpit door, and gave them a rundown of the situation. I told everyone to put their baggage back where it belonged and strap in.

  We sat in tense silence as the seconds ticked away. The plane couldn’t fly much higher, and if we tried to descend, the Rocs could dive straight down and lose altitude more quickly than we could. Our only option was to go through them. If the fighters could clear a path for us, we’d be fine. As horrific as they were, the Rocs were still just some sort of animal, and couldn’t fly nearly as fast as we could. If they placed themselves in our path and hit us though, the damage would be terrible.

  “One minute to contact,” the lead fighter said. “Thirty seconds to missiles.”

  We waited, as the seconds dragged on. The cloud became a mass of black dots, the Rocs gathering directly in our path.

  “Fire.”

  Two streams of white smoke pulled away from the fighters, and seconds later blossomed in a flash of orange flame. As we closed in, the dots resolved into triangles, pin-wheeling toward the sea below.

  “Fire,” the lead fighter said again, and more missiles leapt ahead of us. Swarms of Rocs died, but they were still thick ahead of us. It was a cloud of them like I’d never seen before.

  “Guns, fire.”

  Tracers leapt ahead of the fighters and still more Rocs fell earthward, but I couldn’t see a clear path through the cloud yet. Then there were Rocs on either side of us as we flew through the path cut by the missiles and guns.

  “Keep close,” the tanker pilot radioed. “We don’t want to—”

  A sudden crash and scream burst across the radio. A white puff erupted from the nose of the tanker, as the plane wobbled in its flight path.

  “We’re hit! We’re hit! Oh shit, my eyes…”

  For the briefest moment I saw two of the elongated black triangles streaking toward the tanker and then a gut-wrenching blast of glass and metal fell back in the slipstream along the fuselage as the cockpit exploded. Shrapnel was sucked into the two wing mounted engines, and they blasted a sheet of flame and smoke out their exhaust. The crippled tanker’s nose dropped as it rolled away from us. It made two lumbering spirals before the rudder and wingtips broke off. The tanker disappear
ed into a cloud, trailing smoke and fire.

  “Fire, fire, fire!” the lead fighter ordered. “There’s too many of them! Fire everything you’ve got!”

  Multiple streaks launched from both fighters, and orange flame blossomed ahead. The tracers from their guns continued nonstop, trying to tear through the cloud of Rocs.

  “Turn! Turn! Evasive—” The lead fighter broke up as several Rocs hit it. An instant later it exploded as the recently refilled fuel tanks came apart. Beyond the orange fireball was blue sky, with just a few more Rocs in our way.

  “Keep going!” I shouted. “There’s clear air ahead!”

  “Roger,” said the second fighter pilot.

  Two black triangles streaked by, just feet to our left. I held my breath, but nothing happened. Our remaining fighter launched one more missile, and beyond its brief fireball was blue sky, and safety.

  Two more black streaks went by on our right. Slam. Our airplane slewed violently left and right as the engine blew apart.

  “Oh, shit!” said Brett.

  The master warning light flashed red, and the alarm sounded. I clicked off the autopilot and the airplane rolled sharply right. I rolled us back level.

  “Engine failure, right side,” Brett yelled. “Keep the speed up, Boonie. Head downhill.”

  “You got that right.” I wanted to put some distance between us and the Rocs.

  I looked ahead and saw the fighter there, still in one piece. I didn’t see any more Rocs, except for…

  Three black triangles in close formation streaked by my window, and instantly another slam echoed through the plane, as we yawed violently.

  “Dammit!” Jeff shouted. More red lights popped on, and most of the displays went dark as we lost the last generator.